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Times of change are upon the database market. The major established database companies are being challenged by open source upstarts like MySQL and PostgreSQL. For years, Open Source Databases (OSDBs) have been quietly increasing their penetration, but until recently they have lacked the capabilities to seriously threaten proprietary databases like Oracle, IBM's DB2, and Microsoft's SQL Server.

There were new metrics out this week for both EnterpriseDB's PostgreSQL-centric database business, and Sun Microsystems' MySQL business. These players are at the forefront of challenging pricing for databases and surrounding services from competitors such as Oracle, and both are having strong success with strategies focused on open source databases.

How many open source relational databases can you name? If you’re like most technical people, you probably don’t know any — just as I didn’t until recently. I can already imagine many of you saying... what about MySQL and PostgreSQL?”, but those are just databases, not relational databases.

When it comes to open source databases, MySQL gets the lion’s share of attention. This is unfortunate, because out of the two, PostgreSQL offers much more security, reliability, and data integrity than MySQL does.

Ingres Corporation, the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, announced today the availability of Ingres Database 10, the latest version of the company's flagship open source database product.

Oracle, maker of one of the largest proprietary database solutions, recently purchased Sun, who makes MySQL, a piece of open-source database software. Naturally, this sounds like trouble. One of the biggest database companies buys another of the largest?

SqlSync lets you compare two databases to see which tuples have been added, removed, and changed. You can also use SqlSync to make one database a clone of another and maintain its contents to be that way. One benefit of using SqlSync to perform synchronization is that you can perform heterogeneous syncs -- for example, from MySQL to PostgreSQL.

"In my experience it is rare that you will work with a single database. even if you have data in only one region, you will hopefully at least have a QA database. Therefore to be a serious tool, you need to have some way of making it easy to query multiple databases. Can we extend sql-mode or db-mode to do what we need?

This tutorial describes how to set up database replication in MySQL. MySQL replication allows you to have an exact copy of a database from a master server on another server (slave), and all updates to the database on the master server are immediately replicated to the database on the slave server so that both databases are in sync.